Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Campus Hiring Bias: 78% of Departments have ZERO Republicans

By Professor Doom

The whole point of
a university is to include the entire universe of ideas. It seems noble enough,
but what happens when you allow people in whose ideas don’t allow any other
ideas in? The seed for the takeover was planted decades ago when it was decided
letting such people in was nevertheless part of the university mission.

Eventually, you
get a lockdown. It’s not a fast process, mind you, but as these people with
exclusionary ideas put their chokehold on campus, it accelerates. Past a
certain point (namely, control of the hiring committees), the only people who
can become faculty must hold those ideas, and nothing else.

And so it is that
we now have campuses drowning in ideology, more importantly, drowning in
exactly one ideology. How bad is it?

How clear is it
that there must be bias in the hiring process at these schools? Our schools
scream about how much they want diversity…but as far as hiring goes, there is
to be no diversity in political views. It is worth noting that even at the
schools which may have some Republicans…they’re pretty rare.

Looking at the
statistics further, we get more interesting details, but first let us consider
the data set:

They removed all the adjuncts and temp workers from the
data, for good reason. The majority of college professors are adjuncts today,
with minimal pay and no benefits. You can spend a decade or more as an adjunct,
and if you make any waves (and God forbid you have a pro-Trump bumper
sticker…), you’re gone. These poor adjuncts aren’t about to interrupt the
ideological narrative being instilled in the students, so it’s fair to look at
just the full-time tenure track faculty.

He also excluded 101
professors—a little more than one percent of the total sample

—from the
analysis, because they were registered as members of minor parties (cue big-L
libertarian weeping).

Our “two
party” system is ridiculously corrupted at this point. My entire life it seems
my only choices from the two big parties in a Presidential election are either
the candidate for “massive debts, huge social programs, and endless war” or the
candidate for “massive debts, endless war, and huge social programs.” There are
other parties, and allow me to at least mention the Libertarian party, which
thinks you should be allowed to keep your money, believes it’s far better for
you to take care of yourself, and understands that murder is bad—basically
diametrically opposed in every way to the only two parties you can
realistically choose from in any election.

Throwing out
these “weird” third parties from the study is a little unfair but, seeing as
that’s how alternative political parties are treated everywhere else, I guess
I’ll overlook it here.

While there
is a definite Democrat bias on campus, there are some exceptions in certain
departments:

…the hard sciences—engineering, chemistry, physics, and
mathematics—had more even ratios of Democrats to Republicans…

It’s “almost”
curious that Republicans are often described as Bible-thumping, science-denying
ignorant rubes, while the data from our campuses indicates that if you’re in a
discipline which requires scientific thought and respects empirical evidence, you’re
vastly more likely to be Republican. I put the “almost” in quotes because those
offensive descriptions of Republicans are being provided by the media…which in
turn is predominantly Democrat (incidentally, there are many hysterical videos
on YouTube watching these media guys lose their minds at the outcome of the
last Presidential election, and I encourage the gentle reader to watch a few,
to see just how strong the bias evidently is).

Hmm, a few of those departments have the reputation
of being academic slums. I’m rather surprised Education isn’t here, but the
study is focusing on the higher tier schools, which probably don’t have
Education departments.

…could not find a single Republican with an
"exclusive appointment" to gender studies, Africana studies, or peace
studies.

I’ve never even heard of “peace studies.” In
any event, we clearly are seeing a trend as far as the most disreputable
departments also being the most filled with Democrats. It’s funny, our
metropolitan areas most controlled by Democrats also have a vile reputation.
Hmm.

Now there are some small schools with a
number of Republican faculty, but they tend to be religious or military
schools. You can’t shout “ah ha!” here, because while it’s trivial to find
schools which are exclusively Democrat schools, there are no schools with
exclusively Republican faculty. It’s almost as though one side actually
believes in diversity, while the other only uses it as a tool to grab power.

Overall, the bottom line is a student
can easily go his entire college education without exposure to any non-Democrat
ideas:

…around 78 percent of departments did not contain a
single full-time professor who identifies as Republican.

As I’ve said
before, once a school becomes converged, controlled by this particular set of
political beliefs, the only quick solution is bulldozers. This solution is not
on the table, of course, and so instead these schools will die a slow death, as
they invariably get a reputation for race riots and, more importantly, extreme
indoctrination at the expense of all education. People don’t want to go to such
schools, much less go deep into debt for the privilege of doing so.

Will these
schools take all of higher education down with them? I hope not, but at this
point I can’t be certain.